Fantastic Fest ’23: DogMan is Luc Besson at his Besson-iest

DogMan. // Courtesy of EuropaCorp.

This is part of our coverage of new genre films premiering at Austin’s Fantastic Fest. 

Say anything else you want about Luc Besson’s DogMan; you have to admit it’s unique. That’s been true of most of Besson’s movies, from the career highs (Leon: The Professional, The Fifth Element, La Femme Nikita) to the…um…lows (Angel-A, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Anna, The Messenger). With Besson, you’re as likely to get a surprising instant classic as you are a pile of bizarre, self-indulgent garbage.

So, where does DogMan sit on that spectrum? It’s a jumble. On one hand, it’s a distinct approach to the superhero/supervillain origin story—one blissfully free of IP tie-ins. However, it’s also one of the most achingly awkward, confounding, baffling mainstream films you will likely see anytime soon.

On a rainy New Jersey evening, a box truck passes through a routine police checkpoint. In the driver’s seat, covered in blood and dressed as Marilyn Monroe, is a shaken individual named Douglas (Caleb Landry Jones). Behind him in the back, bafflingly, are roughly (sorry) 40 peaceful canine passengers.

Unsure if Douglas is a victim or a criminal or even what wing of the police station to sequester him in, the local precinct calls police psychologist Evelyn (Jojo T. Gibbs) to question him. What Evelyn discovers through her conversation with Douglas is the strange and twisty tale of a boy who grew up to become the individual known as DogMan.

Douglas claims he was raised in an outdoor kennel, with only issues of The American Standard and Modern Woman and the warmth of dogs to sustain him. A later tragedy left him mostly paralyzed from the waist down and bouncing between foster homes. It’s not all bad, though. He discovers dogs can understand him and even finds refuge at a drag revue on his way to becoming someone truly surprising.

Landry Jones is the film’s clear highlight, not only elevating the material with his heightened performance but doing so in a way that distracts from DogMan’s more confounding elements. It’s a performance of assured and deliberate action and a softness that hides rage and pain, not to mention a physical component.

It’s a shame that the performance belongs to this film. DogMan sees Besson operating in his pretentious wheelhouse, where he acts like he’s making a masterpiece but has nothing to back up his sophomoric philosophical ramblings. This is the corner of the Besson-verse where the director fails to recognize what kind of movie he’s making and refuses to acknowledge no one else is remotely on the same page as he is.

One example: in the third act, Besson introduces an antagonist—Christopher Denham’s Agent Ackerman, an insurance claims investigator — who nearly derails the whole movie to no payoff. Ackerman obsessively follows clues, pores over security footage, and even goes undercover to resolve a series of jewelry thefts he believes are the work of DogMan. When the inevitable showdown does occur between Douglas and Ackerman, it’s abrupt and of no consequence. 

That inconsistency is an indicator of DogMan’s problems as a whole. For every two or three genuinely intriguing ideas Besson investigates, he introduces six half-baked ones simply thrown in for good measure, then never follows up on them. The movie’s tone vacillates so wildly that it’s almost impossible to figure out what’s important and what’s just window dressing.

If you enjoyed Todd Phillips’ Joker but thought it was missing dogs and borderline insulting drag performances of Edith Piaf and Marlene Deitrich songs or wheelchair-bound protagonists with Dr. Doolittle syndrome, DogMan may be for you. It sounds like a niche market, but then, some movies have received cult status for far less insane choices.

In Besson’s mind, it’s DogMan‘s world now. Time will tell if audiences actually want to live in it.